What I've learned by publishing 100 articles in a row

On the 24th of February 2021, I am writing my 100th daily posts in a row. I want to celebrate, but I also wish to reflect and try to write the best lessons learned.

This is my third achievement in writing after:

OK, I can write daily.

I know that I can write every day. So I can put a check on this skill. And I don’t think I have to question it anymore. It’s done. I can prove it. This is the evidence, and it’s online. It’s public. Next, please.

I and you. Too much of “me”, too little of “you.”

The other lesson is about how I relate to my audience. I tend to talk in the first person, as I’m doing right now. I justified that attitude by considering this blog as my private space. “I’m writing for myself and to myself.” That does not hold. This is my website, indeed, but it’s public, there’s a newsletter associated and, although in its infancy, it is visited by about 30’000 people per year.

Even if only a small fraction of the real persons coming to this website, for whatever reason, are reading what I am writing, I need to consider that. Carefully.

I would like to change this attitude by reconsidering the private thoughts and reformulating them to provide value to an audience continuously. I am searching for interactions with people, and I was limiting this possibility when I was publishing personal thoughts with personal conclusions without extra effort to make them relatable and applicable by other people.

I could change my writing style, too. I’m not talking about too radical changes or becoming somebody else. But trying to have less a tendency to say,” I do,” “I think,” “I am,” and more” you,” “you that are reading,” or even better, “we,” “me,” and “you” together.

Eclectic? Ok, fine, but let’s make things clear.

I’m eclectic, not a secret. I like to talk about many different things. And I’m deluding myself into thinking that just adding tags to the posts I’m publishing would be enough to distinguish the threads in my publishing flow clearly. If you pick a tag on my blog and read those articles, maybe you will find continuity, but the problem is with the daily cadence. The question is, what’s the continuity between my thoughts when I am writing every day?

This is my scrapbook. This is my diary. I have diverse ideas, several of them every day. And I can barely write down one of them when I find the time to do it. And that is the lucky moment in which I am publishing this post to update my streak. But that is not a reason to put the burden of making sense of lots of different pieces in a continuous flow on my readers’ shoulders.

There is fragmentation in my content. And it’s not helping clarity, consistency in the narrative. It’s challenging to follow a discourse.

I want to mitigate the content fragmentation issue by reorganizing the homepage. I will create thematic access points. I’d like to identify the common topics and threads and provide a clear entrance to a messy Digital Garden by doing information architecture work.

There could be a bottom-up approach in which I am clustering articles after making an inventory of things already published.

The top-down approach instead would aim at clarifying what my intentions are, what is that I want to write about so that I can also have more direction.

It’s crucial to clarify how you structure your thoughts that you’re publishing, even when they are diverse and fragmented.

My Digital Garden is starving.

My Notes section is a little bit neglected. I had the idea of providing a summary of topics in a more structured way. So you have top-level topics, sub-level topics, and an established hierarchy, and you can follow an index to the website, but it’s not very up-to-date. And so, again, a reader of my website could think that by going there, they would have something that I’m not providing, because it’s not a complete index, you don’t have all the access points to my published knowledge. That’s another task on my to-do list: tend to the Digital Garden.

The Writing practice vs. the Publishing practice

I want to distinguish between the free-flowing practice of improvising the content and downloading my brain vs. more profound and more structured writing.

Free-flowing writing is essential. It has many benefits for my fluency, creativity, and mental health because it’s an excellent form of relaxation and meditation.

There should be a second step of curating, editing, and revising to publish only well-shaped content, better structured, and convey a clear message. Action: practice free-flowing and curate, revised, and edit the best content to be published. Not only the thoughts In my head but also the ideas already published. Reorganization, synthesys, summarization, aggregation, clusterization is something that I need to do more.

Grow your Personal Knowledge Management System

I have quite a bit of content online: about 100,000 words published. It’s not a negligible amount. And this is an excellent motivation to develop my personal knowledge management system on which I’m working. It is one of the threads I am developing in my messy digital garden. And so I could apply it precisely to this content. There are a lot of questions arising from that, like:

How do you integrate the public digital garden with the private one?
How do you provide various access points to your fragmented knowledge?
And then, finally, how do you develop creative ideas from all of this work? As creative ideas, I mean something new, useful, and meaningful.

Grow your network of communities (i.e., People!)

Another implication of this “Write-the-hell-out-of-you” project is that I met a lot of great people. I received a lot of suggestions. I gave a lot of directions. There was a lot of exchanging and trading of knowledge and support. It’s one of the most precious things that I’ve got with my daily online writing habit. I also improved my participation in various communities. I am thinking about Ness Labs, the newly started Knowledge Entrepreneurs, Inner Circle, and the Zettelkasten Forum.

Together with those communities’ best users, my journey became a collective journey along many intertwining paths.

100 of these days

There are no fireworks to celebrate something articulated and somehow intangible as the achievement of having written and published 100 posts in a row. There are no badges nor rewards.

I gained a lot of things, and the best one is that I still feel I have just started.

Massimo Curatella

What I’ve learned by publishing 100 articles in a row

OK, I can write daily.

I and you. Too much of “me”, too little of “you.”

Eclectic? Ok, fine, but let’s make things clear.

My Digital Garden is starving.

The Writing practice vs. the Publishing practice

Grow your Personal Knowledge Management System

Grow your network of communities (i.e., People!)

100 of these days

The 100 Daily Posts in a Row:

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